Four Metro Vancouver areas among Canada’s worst bottlenecks: CAA

There’s nothing Lower Mainland residents like to do more than complain about traffic – and they now have data from the Canadian Automobile Association to fuel their rants.

A CAA report released Wednesday puts four Metro Vancouver roadways among the 20 worst bottlenecks in Canada in 2015.

Granville Street at Southwest Marine Drive was ninth on the list, West Georgia Street between Seymour and West Pender came in 10th, Granville between West Broadway and West 16th Avenue ranked 15th and the George Massey Tunnel rounded out the top 20.

Although the four bottlenecks combined are only four kilometres in length, the report says they waste 542 hours of commuter time, cost $13.5 million in “lost economic opportunities” each year and use up 1.66 million litres of gas.

The B.C. government hopes the tunnel bottleneck will eventually be a thing of the past, as it moves ahead with plans for a 10-lane replacement cable bridge. Construction is slated to begin in 2018 and be completed by 2022 at an estimated cost of $3.5 billion.

If the bridge eliminates the current bottleneck, it could save commuters 97,000 litres in gas per year, to the CAA report. At Metro Vancouver’s current average price of $1.30 per litre, that makes for a savings of $126,100 each year and a time savings of 60,000 hours annually. It could also reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 255,000 kg each year.